I am in the kitchen of the house I grew up
in,
holding a head of cabbage stable on the cutting board with both hands,
while my
mother thrusts a cleaver into it, slicing it in half. The leaves are
densely
packed in a squiggle of translucent white and green. She hands the knife
to me,
instructing me to cut the cabbage into thin shreds. When my slices are
too
coarse, she thwaps the back of my hand with a wet soup spoon and tells
me to
cut them finer.

We are making goi ga, which is a Vietnamese
chicken and cabbage salad. Most of it is just work: chopping and dicing,
gathering herbs from the garden, where they grow in big ceramic pots
along the
driveway, pulling apart the steamed meat by hand. Have you ever cooked a
whole
chicken before? You can get at least two dishes out of it. The salad and
then a
soup that you make by boiling the bones. It’s simple kitchen things, but
some
of it requires finesse. When you make the dressing, if it’s too salty or
spicy,
you add coconut soda. “Normally, coconut juice,” my mother says, “but
this is
how we do things in America.”

I would be lying if I said that food is all
there is of culture, but it is the thing that is the easiest to explain,
the
thing that is most physical and visceral. Is finding home just a matter
of
having the right hot peppers burn your tongue? The first weekend I moved
into
the brick house with the green porch on Howe Street, I went grocery
shopping
and stumbled into a tiny Chinese market about a mile down Whalley. I
don’t know
if I could tell you what it’s called, now. It had just opened, but
already smelled
familiar. It’s an open secret that all Asian-American grocery stores
contain
tiny, hidden portals to each other, as well as your childhood. No matter
where
you go, you will find the snacks you ate after school when you were
eight years
old; the plastic stool you used to sit and take baths on when you were a
toddler; the pastel clothespins that your extended family use to
hang-dry their
shirts.

I wandered in, wanting to fill up my empty
corner of the pantry. One thing no one tells you when are nineteen and
preparing to move into a new house for the first time is that you will
need to
stock your kitchen with all the spices and pastes and implements that
you were
so fortunate to be born into, the silver spoon of the first-generation
American
youth. The spice drawers in the kitchen of the house I grew up in have a
thin
film of chili and curry powder on the bottom; that’s how lucky I was to
be
born.

Downstairs, the market was cool and smelled
stale. Mangoes were ripening, stacked in huge flats; I picked one up in
my
hands, hefting its weight, smelling the goldening skin. There were bins
of tea,
dried fruit and fish and squid, impassive glass jars of pickled
vegetables.
There were two shelves devoted entirely to chili sauces, and it was
there that
I found the plastic jar of hot garlic chili paste that I only know—as I
only
know so many things—by its Vietnamese name. I bought it immediately,
along with
a hand of ginger. Ginger is good for taking care of yourself or sick
friends,
if you put it in tea.

When I got home—by home, I mean the house in
New
Haven, Connecticut, which has white walls that still emanate the clean
brightness of fresh paint, and a kitchen so narrow that only two people
can
comfortably cook in it at once—I unscrewed the little plastic jar with
its
green cap, and peeled back the safety lid. I dipped my pinky in the red
paste,
feeling a little ashamed but mostly anxious to make sure I’d found the
right
thing. It was, so I ate it every morning on my eggs for the rest of the
semester.

To make the dressing for goi ga, you take
water,
a little rice vinegar, a little fish sauce, that red chili garlic paste,
and
coconut soda, the kind that comes in a shiny emerald pop-top can, and
then mix
them in a blue ceramic bowl until your mother approves. Alternatively,
you mix
it yourself, put the entire salad together, actually, with the chicken
and
cabbage nestled under the chopped Thai basil and the mint and the lime
juice
and drizzle the dressing over it and turn it over and over with two
forks and
present it at dinner, a gleaming, white and green and oily-peppered
offering.
The dregs of salty shreds of cabbage left in the bottom of the big china
bowl
are the only sign you did it right, but it’s enough.

Over my last winter break, my brother and I
went
to a grocery store on 82nd, deep southeast Portland, to buy
snacks.
It’s something we do together; we’ve grown closer since I moved out. He
dragged
me over to the soft drinks section and put a bottle of Calpis in my
hands. “It
tastes just like the stuff we used to have,” he said. There was a yogurt
drink­—I
hate never knowing the names of things, but I’m used to it by now—and it
tasted
sort of orangey, and came in boxes that you poked open with a straw. We
bought
it and he was right: it was the same thing, just in different packaging.
Proust
had madeleines; I have lychee gummy candy and yogurt drinks and rice
crackers
with tiny specks of white sugar crystallized on their puffed tops.

It feels like cheating, to write about
culture
by writing about food. But how else do I explain that it wasn’t until I
left my
mother’s kitchen that I learned I was always struggling to remember
names? How
do I explain the trawling, the sifting, the smelling, trying to decide:
was
this it? Is this it? I’ve spent hours in these tiny grocery stores,
running
heavy-bellied grains of rice through my hands.

When I told my mother I was writing this
piece,
she said, “You had better not write any more bad things about me.”

I said to her, “I can’t help it, I write
about
you so much.

We are so similar it hurts. When I was still
in
high school, I saw a picture of her when she was sixteen. She looked
just like
me, only prettier, her skin clear and bright.

A few weeks
after my conversation with my mother, I got a care package from home.
“Open it
soon, they’ll rot,” she told me; calling me on the phone I am never
without in
case someone I love is sick. I cut open the box and found a dozen
persimmons,
nestled in paper towels. They glowed warm orange in the heat of the lamp
of my
kitchen, not so shiny and new anymore, with a thin film of spice dust
building
up in the cupboards, and I was heartsick for a moment, I missed home so
much.

Not that I know
where home is anymore, not that I don’t think both coasts and countries
have a
claim on my component parts, not that I can hardly remember the last
time I
picked persimmons off the tree in my family’s back yard, their skins
shone over
with a sudden frost. It would have been late October and I must have
been
seventeen. That batch was too bitter to eat raw; we made jam with cups
and cups
of sugar, trying to sweet the tannins in the fruit. Not that I don’t
still
linger in grocery stores, trailing my hands over fruit that’s marketed
as lush
and exotic, the things I grew up eating recontextualized and strange on
this
chilly New England rocky soil, not that I am only writing about food
because I
don’t know any other way to say the things that I am feeling.

On my street in
New Haven, there’s a crabapple tree. I guess it’s the next best thing to
the
persimmon tree I grew up next to; the pears and plums I picked and
carried
around in my shirt. It flowers in the spring and snows pink petals all
over the
sidewalk; by July, there’s hard green fruit in the trees. In September,
you can
pick them. They’re yellow and red by then, blushing like you wouldn’t
believe
how sour they can be. I stole a basket of them off the tree with my best
friend, soon after I moved in. We tried to make a salad of them: grated
carrots
and sliced avocado and chickpeas, topped with these halved crisp
stone-less
cherries. No matter how hard we tried, nothing would sweeten them. And
though I
kept taking bites, each one made my mouth pucker, rosy as a kiss.

Larissa Pham is an artist and writer interested in intimacy, new
narratives, and the ways in which our lives intersect with modern media.
She is a regular contributor at Full Stop Magazine and has been
previously published in The Rumpus, Salon, Nerve, and The Ellipses
Project. She currently splits her time between Portland, OR, and New
Haven, CT. You can find her on twitter at @lrsphm.